A first person ARPG with an emphasis on stealth and infiltration set in a steampunk-eque world. It also features whale oil as a major resource, an underused motif in games I feel. It's being developed by Arkane Studios, of Arx Fatalis fame (and Dark Messiah of Might and Magic infamy). Included in the dev team are Harvey Smith (Deus Ex, Thief) and Viktor Antonov (Half-Life 2).

I hope it leans more towards Deus Ex than Bioshock personally. I found the latter a bit too shootery, although to be fair Ken Levine constantly stressed before release that it was a FPS and not an RPG.

Last edited by DarthParametric; 08-08-2011 at 01:28 PM.
Reason: 2am-induced name dyslexia

This one has me by surprise and I'm delighted to see Harvey Smith in action, further awesomified by Viktor Antonov. I quite like the idea of an FPS/RPG in a steampunk setting, it's something I've dreamed of since Arcanum.

The way the "franchise" is being built now though, looks a lot like how EA set up Dragon Age. I wonder if the Human Revolution hype-machine was a key to giving this game the go-ahead. Is this finally the Promised Land of boundless, immersive FPS/RPGs?

I'd like to see more on how the stealth focus make it different from others RPG-FPS hybrids. It may be the start of a new successful and diverse franchise (because everything has a sequel nowadays, as we know all too well).

How is Dark Messiah infamous? Its the best game of its genre, which of course is Fantasy Action Whack Alot Of Foes To Death In Straightforward But Visually And Gameplay Wise Satisfying Surroundings Role Playing Game, or FAWAOFTDISBVAGWSSRPG.

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Coming out tomorrow, and it's already getting... interesting reviews CVG gives it a 9.5 and lavishes some heavy praise towards the end of the video:

YouTube Video

Shacknews' Review was live earlier, and then pulled due to an embargo, but some quotes preserved by NeoGAF say:

Quote:

And for that reason, Arkane Studios' Dishonored is a great RPG. My emotions drove my style of game play as the bodyguard Corvo, falsely accused of killing a beloved Empress and my friend. I started with the mindset that clearing my name was secondary to finding those that killed her and kidnapped her daughter, the future monarch that I had watched grow up in my time as their bodyguard. I began play in a non-lethal fashion, fully unaware that what I was about to experience went well beyond the traditional point-and-click RPGs.

...

But minor flaws aside, by the time the end credits rolled, I was emotionally exhausted and simultaneously stunned that a game could change the way I have always played. Dishonored is that rare RPG that takes the best of suspense novels and action movies and crafts them into the interactive experience. There is no need for number crunching or debates over ideal character builds. It is role-playing at its story-driven finest and Arkane has created an RPG formula worth emulating.

There's a brilliant sense of consequence and reciprocity to Dishonored that makes even small actions seem like potential triggers for much greater cascades.
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Dishonored succeeds, despite its late narrative missteps. With everything against it, Arkane has created a game with a unifying vision and design that stands apart from its contemporaries as something different. But more importantly, Dishonored succeeds as an ambitious game not content to take one thing and do it well. It demands more than most games ever will of its player, and gives more to players than most other games will ever manage.

It's deceptively easy to reduce the game to a laundry list of obvious influences, but if a game is going to draw from its peers, you'd be hard pushed to come up with a better list than that. Crucially, Dishonored folds these inherited and inspired-by systems into a world that is very much its own, where Dickensian squalor rubs up against the ruthless intrigue of a Tudor court in a city financed by whale oil and whiskey and overrun with rats.
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This is a muscular and confident game, one with the utmost faith in its own fiction and a dedication to gameplay satisfaction at a microscopic level, paid off in dozens of situations that feel completely random and organic, even when they've clearly been planted there for you to find. Tighter control and a more generous approach to replay value would elevate Dishonored to true classic status, but it stands as one of the year's best all the same.

It's a rare game that feels so compulsively replayable, but Dishonored is such a game. The compelling abilities, the bold artistic design, the colorful characters, and above all, the freedom of choice--these are the things that mark Dishonored as one of the truly remarkable games of this year.

Dishonored is the tale of a city. And what a city it is. I haven’t wanted to study and explore a place as much as this since Thief introduced its marvellous warren of secrets, and it’s not only in its superb creation of an urban space both fantastical and relatable that Arkane’s game brings Looking Glass’s work to mind. Dishonored is almost certainly the finest stealth game I’ve played since the dawn of The Metal Age.
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Human Revolution took place in a future where improbably vents were very much in fashion, while Dishonored approaches the problem of presenting alternate routes in a much more satisfactory way. In fact, it doesn’t present routes; at its strongest (which is most of what is at least twenty hours if savoured rather than scoffed), it presents places and leaves the player to make routes rather than finding them.
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The combination of blinking and an extended jump makes moving through the levels feel surprisingly close to Mirror’s Edge rather than an FPS. Dishonored’s stealth is based around speed as much as silence and shadows. There’s a fluidity to movement that is perfectly sold by the positioning and reaction of the viewpoint when mantling, falling or leaping between rooftops. ... All the while there might be bullets tearing through the air as pursuers’ failure to keep up with the chase makes Corvo seem like an impossible creature, a being of air rather than flesh.
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The city reacts to the amount of corpses Corvo leaves in its tenements and slums, with the plague and the guards both strengthening in response to the chaos his actions cause.
Kill more people and more rat swarms and weepers will creep into each district as the infrastructure collapses. At the same time, the false regent, afraid and angry, will deploy more troops and more technology in a bid to win back the streets.
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That’s why Dishonored is important right now. It feels like a game from another timeline, one where Thief and System Shock set the bar for what first-person games could be, leading to designs that were built around intelligent use of space and world-building.
...
Dishonored is a work of rare imagination and skill, the sort of thing that can’t simply be copied and repeated. I hope I’m wrong, but we may not see its like again for a good while.

Dishonored gives you a beautiful, fascinating, new world to explore, and then makes it your playground for grand misdeeds. Its story of political intrigue and betrayal is told at exactly the right pace, balancing information with action in a way that keeps you interested, but not overloaded. Dishonored is smart enough to know not to try too hard to impress you, and as a result, it will blow you away.

The fact that someone’s still putting real effort into the PC version of their multi-platform game is one good reason to buy it. But with Dishonored, there are quite a few. The fact that it doesn’t have any unskippable boss fights. That it’s one of the few major new games that isn’t a sequel or a remake. That a developer went to huge lengths to allow players this much freedom, and a publisher gave them the time and money to make it this slick.

It’s a big, shiny example of so much we keep asking for in games, but rarely get. Luckily, the best way to vindicate it is to buy and then play an amazing game.

Finished the game last night. I decided to use a stealthy and non-lethal approach and managed to finish the game with low chaos, getting by with only two deaths in the first mission (not sure which two people managed to die - either they were the assassins at the very start of the game, or two unlucky bastards I stuffed in a closed garbage container before setting off the explosives on the door right next to it).

The story is pretty simple, but nicely done. The plot twist in the last third was predictable - especially if you like to explore, read through journals, use the Hearth to hear secrets and listen to the audio logs - but it was well done nonetheless. As for the ending I got, I think it was one of the better video game endings in recent years - it was just the right length, covered every important plot point, left just enough room for interpretation and overall rounded this one whole pretty nicely. I've checked out the remaining two endings on youtube and I can say the same for them - the story is always rounded pretty nicely and I think it's very refreshing and a step in the right direction, especially after a ton of endings with deliberate and sometimes cheap cliffhangers. Developers need to (re)learn that they can make a sequel of a game, if they want, even without resorting to crap like that.

So, overall I'm left with a very positive impression and would recommend this game to anyone who enjoys genre hybrids like Deus Ex, Dark Messiah and the like.

Started playing it today. And it's as swell as it looks. Now, either they got Kristoffer Tabori to play the Spymaster or it's someone that sounds remarkably like him. Can't find the answer on the web, with the stellar voice acting crew drawing all the attention to themselves. Not undeservedly.

On a side note, I figured out who I accidentally killed in the first mission - the two guys I stuffed in a garbage dumpster. I was foolish enough to think they'd be safe from the blast in a closed metal dumpster, but apparently it was not enough and they ended up dead after the bomb went off. Made me replay the mission from that section. Damn. Oh well, at least this time I cracked the safe in the sewers.